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Why do we as a society accept that the best way to turn a boy into a man is to intimidate and berate them in front of their peers? There were celebratory words in The Buffalo News Newspaper recently, extolling the virtues of a man who did just that.
He is a retired high school football coach who has coached in Buffalo for 28 years. I'm not looking to attack this specific coach. I'm sure many of the boys who were coached under him are better for having known him. I'm sure his adoration for the boys was sincere. What I do what to address is this style of coaching which seems so prevalent today.

WWhen I mentioned to my nephew, who plays football for a Buffalo Public High School, my intentions of writing this piece, his response was that coaches have to speak that way to players. He referred to his coaches swearing at them and using other, similar techniques to motivate them. He said that coaches need to be strict. And therein comes part of the problem. We think that yelling and insulting our boys is the same as being strict.

Sure many boys respond to these tactics. They respond by playing harder on the field, they also respond by walling off their emotions. Why is it so difficult to understand that giving boys' responsibility, real life consequences for their actions, and structure, is what it really means to be strict?

I work as a middle school teacher with at risk students. At our school we focus on respect, and belonging for our students. We help them to accentuate their strengths and minimize their weaknesses. We prepare them for adulthood. They are aware and deal daily with the consequences of their actions. Consequences, not unlike the ones that they will need to deal with, when they reach adulthood. Yelling and belittling someone is not a natural consequence, it's the action of someone out of control.

If we really thought that this style of motivating students worked we would use it in the classroom. We could spew insults to the student who is unable to answer a math question, get in the face of the other student who didn't know who is buried in Grants Tomb, and loudly question the manhood of the student whose grammar is sub par. But we don't do this because we know it doesn't work. It is abusive and disrespectful.

So why do we continue to still think it works on our football fields? This treatment models disrespectful behavior to our players. It's time we stopped calling abuse "tough love", and more importantly, it' time we started to speak out against it. Let's find a better way to motivate our boys, so they can become healthy young men.

Learn more about this author, Marek Parker.
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